12. The price of greatness is responsibility.
- Winston Churchill
Let’s make a responsible world…
Notas del editor
Med Jones is an industry veteran and has been associated with International Institute of Management – US. And, is one of those few intelligent brains and business minds who predicted the 2008 disaster for United States. And, I think what he said makes sense to a greater extend than what I can explain through my words. And, with the subject I would like to touch today, everything would boil down to the real sense in “Value Chains”. Creating a value chain is as critical for a business as oxygen for human body, and thus it is important to see through the hazy roads, improve visibility by creating sustainable business model, with effective value chains in all facets. And, we will talk through the very basics of how we can adopt simple thoughts to be more responsible…
There has been a myth that shared services mean centralisation, it actually isn’t in literal meaning. It is centralising tasks that are for supporting core business. Also, Shared services need not be outside the organisation, so not necessarily are Outsourced Services. But, certainly, in many ways more benefits are derived and observed in outsourced model, as it is virtually centralised and physically distributed (in many cases) passing on observed benefits to the customers in terms of costs, keeping competitive quality, meeting speified SLAs
Shared services or outsourced services model talks about an independent unit which can act as an enabler to any business, bringing focus on services, deliverables, and building efficiencies in the value chain. What is important to note is that it is as easy as difficult, so right focus area and approach as important. So, to develop a complete new thought is critical. And, that’s why it is important to think of Business along with society. There are 3 major aspects of developing business. Those are impact, scalability flexibility, and Quality of services. We shall talk more of services in the slide to come
While talking about developing any model or breaking the jinx that are prevailing for decades, it’s important to consider Society between the services and customer (be it internal or external). If this is given due diligence, it will
Many industry experts have envisaged and in some cases experienced higher risks in shared or outsourcing services. Also, it is considered that the work is not of much important i.e. repetitive and un-skilled work. But, this needs a paradigm shift in how outsourced or shared services are considered, and with that the generic drawbacks of this model can be overcome; that too with a sense of joy and satisfaction
Some of the issues or problems over thought on this subject are:
Over-standardisation of systems and processes.
Lack of operational flexibility.
Unbalanced power concentration.
Increased system complexity.
Unclear service accountability.
Dampened employee morale.
Ineffective communication.
Unexpected implementation cost escalation.
Long project timelines.
There are just 3 ingredients to make a Shared or outsourced services model effective, i.e. knowledge, skill, and attitude. In order to make anything work, what needs to adjudged is, whether the team has right attitude or not. Knowledge is something which can be judged to a bare minimum level, and a un-skilled resource can be mixed with little knowledge to make the resource usable, and then over a period of time from 100s of knowledgeable resources may be converting a few to Skilled resources (developed over a period of time), which will be a bonus.